Receive your e-mails through SMS for free

This post is beneficial for Indian people only.
MyToday.com provides free, instant, e-mail alert notifications via SMS. I discovered this just a week ago, although it existed since quite long and many of my friends were using it and me being totally ignorant about it!!!
To use the service, you just need to carry out the following two steps:

1. Send an SMS to 575758 with the following text MAIL START <your city name>
For example: MAIL START DELHI
or
MAIL START CHANDIGARH
If you live in a small city/town, then you may send your state's capital city name.
2. The next step is to login to your e-mail account and set an autoforwarder that sends every incoming mail to 91<ur 10 digit mob. no.>@m3m.in
Example: 919876543210@m3m.in

Now whenever any e-mail arrives in your inbox, your mail provider will forward a copy of it to mytoday, and they'll in turn send it to you immediately through SMS.

There are several applications of this service. It depends on your thought power and creativity to tap them. One simple one is instant sms alerts for orkut scraps.

For that, just login to your orkut account from PC and click settings. There in notifications set scrap notifications to be sent by e-mail. And thats it!!! Now, whenever anyone scraps you, you'll immediately receive an SMS.

This service is absolutely free, except for the first activation SMS that you sent. Airtel charges Rs.3 for that. I dunno about other operator charges.

Enjoy!!!

Built-in phone mail client configuration

So, you purchased a shiny new cellphone and flaunting its camera and navigation and browser and music player and other features. Contented with that only?? Don't be!! There are lots more inside which probably you don't know how to use. This post delves into one such feature which is found on almost all phones that have data connectivity i.e. GPRS, EDGE, 3G, HSDPA viz. the built in e-mail client.
For configuration instructions, I'm referring here Sony Ericsson phones. Configuration on other brands is similar too.
Ok, so lets start. SE phones can be broadly classified into two categories based on the software. The popular and mass seller among the two is their Java phones. All the K, C, T, Z series phones fall in this category. Most W series phones too fall in this category. W950 and W960 are the exceptions. The other category of their phones are the Smart Phones running Symbian OS. P and G series phones fall in this category. The configuration is quite similar on both types of phones. For coherency, I'm taking the Java phones in consideration. And, I'm taking GMail as your mail provider. Before doing all that is below, login to your gmail from your computer and enable POP and e-mail forwarding in settings. Also enable IMAP.
Now, on your phone open Menu-Messaging-Email-Accounts-New Account.
Enter your name, email address in the text boxes. In the username box enter in this format username@gmail.com and in password box enter your password. Choose Connection Type as IMAP4. Enter the server address as imap.gmail.com and SMTP server as smtp.gmail.com. Enable SSL in IMAP settings. In SMTP settings enable SSL as well as SMTP authentication and enter your username and password. Set the Connect using field to your default data(gprs/3g) account. Save the settings. You're done!!! Now open Inbox and in More click Send & Receive. Wait till the phone connects to google's servers and downloads your mails. It may take some time depending upon your connection speed and no. of mails in your inbox. To compose a mail use the Write new option in email menu. If you're stuck somewhere then do ask me with the details here by posting a comment. For newbies this may occur as I've written all of this thinking that you're a bit experienced with your phone.
In P series phones, all of this is pretty similar. In Messging tap More-Email accounts. There create new. IMAP and SMTP configuration settings are to be done in Inbox and Outbox tabs.
That was all for today. I'll come up with configuring your phone's IM client in the next post.